Chastened Republicans Beat Democrats at Their Own Ground Game

The Republicans’ ground game and digital strategy in 2012 were disasters, bad enough to become a political punch line. The party was determined not to repeat those mistakes, and operatives were well on their way to overhauling its systems this election cycle when the Democrats announced their “Bannock Street project,” an ambitious voter-mobilization program.

Though the Republicans were already building a national ground game, they decided to leverage the Democrats’ $60 million get-out-the-vote effort to their own advantage. They devoured news reports about the project and scoured Federal Election Commission filings to learn as much as they could about how their rivals were structuring their turnout operations in battleground states.

“It was kind of a mirror image of what we were doing,” said Rob Collins, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “It gave us the scope, it gave us the size, and it gave us the target, which was helpful.”

“We just felt we were in catch-up mode,” he added, “and you never know how fast you can catch up.”

Advances in data, analytics and targeting helped Republicans pick up at least seven Senate seats and add to their ample majority in the House. They hope that forward motion will help them when the stakes are even greater in 2016, when they will be trying to win the White House and maintain control of Congress in a much more difficult electoral climate.

“We made a commitment to mechanics and data and digital operations first and foremost,” said Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “In many cases we’re beating the Democrats at their own game, and in other places we’re at a tie.”

The Democrats, meanwhile, were relearning the hard way what they say they have always known: that even the best funded, most sophisticated turnout operation, in the words of Guy Cecil, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, “is necessary but not sufficient to win.”

“The Republicans could have been printing their voter file list from a Commodore 64, and it would not have fundamentally changed the election,” said Mr. Cecil, who helped mastermind the turnout effort intended to make the composition of the 2014 electorate more like that of a presidential year. Referring to the voter turnout operation, he added, “This election was not a field election.”

Nationally, the older and whiter electorate this cycle did not come close to resembling the Democratic coalition that twice lifted President Obama to victory. And Democrats and Republicans turned out in roughly equal numbers rather than Democrats outnumbering Republicans, as was the case in 2008 and 2012, according to the national exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

Yet in states where Senate Democrats invested heavily in targeting and turnout operations, like Colorado and North Carolina, they succeeded in their original goal of making the electorate more favorable for them than it was in 2010. It simply was not enough to win.

In Colorado, for instance, they narrowed the Republican edge in party registration by at least a full percentage point compared with 2010, when Democrats won there, according to a New York Times analysis of voter turnout data available from the Colorado secretary of state. (In fact, the Colorado ground game that helped Senator Michael Bennet, now the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, win in 2010 was deemed such a success that the Bannock Street project took its name — and inspiration — from his Denver field headquarters.)

In North Carolina, where Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat, needed to turn out African-American voters to have a shot at victory, black voters represented a larger share of the electorate than they did in 2010, according to an analysis of exit polls and voter turnout data available from the State Board of Elections.

The Senate Democratic committee also pointed out that Democrats up and down the ballot fared worse in states where they did not invest heavily, like Virginia; there, low turnout helped Ed Gillespie, a Republican, nearly unseat the Democratic incumbent, Mark Warner, in what would have been the biggest upset on Election Day.

But in an election that was largely a referendum on an unpopular president, an expensive and sleek get-out-the-vote effort was not enough. After all, targeting and analytics have their limits — especially among angry voters who do not want to be persuaded — and even the best ground games only make a difference in the margins when races are close.

“If the other guys have got the better of the argument, they’ll get the better of the turnout, no matter how sophisticated your turnout operation is,” said Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate.

Republicans were also busy enhancing their own targeting and turnout machine. The Republican National Committee, which had already invested in a national ground game, built an in-house data and analytics infrastructure. They tested their model universe, making thousands of calls each week to voters in order to better refine their targeting assumptions. And they used the special election in March in Florida’s 13th Congressional District to quietly test their smartphone apps.

They also had outside help. Groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce began changing their digital culture by requiring between 10 percent and 20 percent of their advertising dollars to be spent on digital. And Americans for Prosperity — the group founded by Charles G. and David H. Koch, the conservative billionaire brothers — overhauled the technology it was using and poured more than $125 million into a sustained field effort, knocking on 2.5 million doors across 26 states this cycle.

“The past years have taught us that we have to pay attention to the details of building a genuinely long-term infrastructure,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. “That means a great deal of attention to the technology we’re using to reach voters, to the data to make sure we’re actually going to the right individuals, and then it means making sure your staff and volunteers — who you’ve invested a great deal in — are the most effective they can possibly be.”

Both sides have a tendency to overstate the role of the technological wizardry, especially after a lopsided election. “Frankly, it’s easier to say the other side had better computers than to say we had worse ideas,” said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.”

But, he added, those tactics can make a critical difference in a close election — and keep an election closer for a party facing political headwinds.

“It appears that Bannock Street was successful in what they were trying to do,” said Mike Shields, chief of staff at the Republican National Committee. “The difference is we are now in this game, too, and they don’t have the game to themselves.”

Nate Cohn contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Chastened Republicans Beat Democrats at Their Own Ground Game. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe